Abstract
A pillar of Mississippi’s argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was that there is no evidence of “societal reliance” on abortion, meaning no reason to believe that access to abortion impacts the ability of women to participate in the economic and social life of the nation. Led by economist Caitlin Myers and attorney Anjali Srinivasan, more than 150 economists filed an amicus brief seeking to assist the Court in understanding that this assertion is erroneous. The economists describe developments in causal inference methodologies over the last three decades, and the ways in which these tools have been used to isolate the measure of the effects of abortion legalization in the 1970s and of abortion policies and access over the ensuing decades. The economists argue that there is a substantial body of well-developed and credible research that shows that abortion access has had and continues to have a significant effect on birth rates as well as broad downstream social and economic effects, including on women’s educational attainment and job opportunities. What follows is a reprint of this brief.